News

9.20.2021
Dr Bennett, Dr Chappell and Dr. Silberg present synbio research at Rice Science Cafe in the newly built innovation hub!

9.20.2021
Grant backs effort to build useful bacterial colonies. Article.

10.14.2019
Synthetic cells make long-distance calls. Article.

8.12.2019
Bacteria made to mimic cells, form communities. Article.

8.14.2018
Models give synthetic biologists a head start. Article.

1.11.2018
Rice U. biologists create toolkit for tuning genetic circuits. Article.

7.21.2017
Our lab receieves new funding to investigate synthetic microbial consortia: Scientists seek to engineer chatter among cells.

4.10.2017
The logic of synthetic biology: turning cells into computers.

3.14.2017
Pi Day! On Pi Day, computational biologists (including Dr. Bennett) share what they love about math.

10.12.2016
Food fight! Our lab receives new funding from the NIH to develop microbiome technologies.

8.3.2016
Synthetic biologists developing cells programmed to target, destroy cancer, an article by the Genetic Literacy Project, mentions our work.

6.1.2016
An article about our lab appeared in The Scientist.

4.11.2016
Congratulations to former lab member Adam Atanas for receiving the Goldwater Scholarship!

4.4.2016
Congratulations to Razan and David for receiving NSF Graduate Research Fellowships!

3.31.2016
Dr. Bennett is quoted in an article in New Scientist about recent work on a biocoding language developed by the Voigt Lab.

12.31.2015
"Birth of the bacterial circuit" - an article in ASME about our recent research can be read here.

12.22.2015
Alan's paper characterizing noise in a synthetic gene oscillator was published in PLoS Computational Biology.

11.24.2015
Jae's latest on quasi-steady state approximations in the Gillespie algorithm was just published here.

9.2.2015
A nice article about our paper was just published in New Scientist.

8.27.2015
Read the Perspective article on our recent work published in Science.

8.27.2015
Chen Ye and Jae's paper on synthetic microbial consortia was published in Science. See also press releases from Rice and KAIST.

7.22.2015
Truong and Chinmaya's paper on dynamics in the yeast galactose network was published in PLOS Computational Biology.

7.6.2015
Rice University awarded $1M grant from Keck Foundation to engineer microbial biosensors for soil.

12.1.2014
"
Synthetic Biology, Real Mathematics," an article in SIAM News, discusses the need for mathematical modeling in synthetic biology and highlights our recent work on temperature compensation.

11.11.2014
An article in The Scientist on mind-controlled gene regulation quotes Dr. Bennett.

9.19.2014
David's new paper on chimeric protein-mediated logic gating made the cover of ACS Synthetic Biology.

8.5.2014
Jae's new paper on improving stochastic simulations of gene networks appeared in Biophysical Journal.

8.4.2014
Read the Rice press release on David's new research here.

8.1.2014
David's commentary on new biotechnologies using split T7 RNAP was published in Molecular Systems Biology.

5.16.2014
Calvin Schmidt George J. Schroepfer, Jr. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research in Biochemistry & Cell Biology.

4.14.2014
Dr. Bennett was quoted in an interview on synthetic biology entrepreneurship.

3.6.2014
Dr. Bennett gave a keynote speech at the Synthetic Biology Future Conference in Cork City, Ireland. The Silicon Republic held an interview with him before the event.

1.7.2014
"Engineered temperature compensation in a synthetic genetic clock" was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rice put out a news release about it here.

10.6.2013
David Shis won the George J. Schroepfer, Jr. Award for Outstanding Published Research in Biochemistry & Cell Biology.

9.11.2013
Chen Ye's work "Biochar and Microbial Signaling: Production Conditions Determine Effects on Microbial Communication" was published in Environmental Science & Technology. An article was written about it here.

8.24.2013
Andrew Hirning and Erin O'Brien won the BCB Service Award at the BCB GSA Research Symposium.

8.4.2013
"Transcriptional Delay Stabilizes Bistable Gene Networks" was published in Physical Review Letters.

4.12.2013
Calvin Schmidt and Timothy Hallacy presented posters at the 2013 Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium.

3.13.2012
Ars Technica wrote an article about David's paper, as did Rice University.

3.1.2013
"A library of synthetic transcriptional AND gates built with split T7 RNA polymerase mutants" was accepted for publication in PNAS.

10.19.2012
"Stable Maintenance of Multiple Plasmids in E. coli Using a Single Selective Marker" was published in ACS Synthetic Biology. Dr. Bennett was interviewed about it for their podcast .

10.12.2012
Calvin Schmidt presented a poster at the Rice Centennial Poster Session.

8.27.2012
Truong Nguyen presented a poster at the International Conference on Stochastic Processes in Systems Biology, Genetics and Evolution.


8.14.2012
Drs. Bennett, Josic, and Ott were awarded an NIH grant for the study of delays in gene transcription.

5.5.2012
Calvin Schmidt was awarded a best presentation prize in the Natural Sciences division of the 2012 Rice Undergraduate Research Symposium. Pictures from the event are below.

4.12.2012
"Mapping the Environmental Fitness Landscape of a Synthetic Gene Circuit"; published in PLoS Computational Biology. This was a collaborative project led by Gábor Balázsi's lab at MDACC.

4.5.2012
Erin O'Brien and Elizabeth Van Itallie were awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowships! Read more here.

1.18.2012
"Modeling synthetic gene oscillators" published.

12.16.2011
"Yeast rises up against RNA foes."

12.12.2011
"Antagonistic gene transcripts regulate adaptation to new growth environments" published in PNAS. PDF

11.16.2011
Read about the new Systems and Synthetic Biology Group at Rice University here. The SSB website can be found here.

11.10.2011
"Stochastic delay accelerates signaling in gene networks" appears in PLoS Computaional Biology. PDF

9.28.2011
The Bennett lab was featured in a BioTechniques article.